“Did she love the money?” I asked.

“I don’t think she did. I don’t think she gave a shit about the money.”

“How did she die?” I asked, though I already knew.

“Car accident,” she said. “Unrelated. To the drinking.”

“And your dad still drives like that? Drunk like that?”

“I never really thought about it, but I guess that is kind of weird.”

We were quiet then, walking along a long stretch of road that bordered the oil refinery. Every now and again, a car would rush by, blinding us with its headlights and making us dizzy with wind, and we would pause. I had a terrible blister developing on my baby toe from where it rubbed inside my shoe, and she laughed at me when I mentioned it. “Wuss,” she said. “Want me to carry you?”

“You can’t carry me,” I said, and to my surprise she picked me up and swung me into her arms like I was a bride crossing the threshold, and walked easily with me like that, even as I kicked and yelled at her to stop and put me down. When she finally did, I was breathless and a little thrilled. I was so confused by her. By her naïveté mixed up with her worldliness, by her beauty that was so unattended by vulnerability.

“So what happened? Why did you move in with your aunt?” Bunny asked.

“Oh,” I said. This was the part of the story I had been most dreading, since it was the sharpest fork in our diverging experiences. “Well, one night they were fighting, and she just stabbed him, in the chest, with one of the kitchen knives, not a big one, like a little fruit knife? So she went to prison.”

“Oh my god,” Bunny said. I worried she would think I was trashy or low-class for having a mother who had been to prison. I myself was very ashamed about it. It seemed an inherently shameful thing to me.

“He didn’t die or anything, he just had to get stitches, but she got three years for it.”

“So that’s when you moved in with your aunt.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unable to look at her, certain that now she would think differently of me.

“It’s such a shame we didn’t become friends earlier,” she said, grabbing my hand. “All this time, we could have been friends. Doesn’t that just seem so sad?”

But I was glowing, electric, so happy I could not even feel regret for those lost years. I had made my first friend in North Shore. My first best friend in my entire life really. And we were walking by the sea, a little lost and holding hands.

I had first begun finding men to meet on Craigslist when I was thirteen. I had not intended to reply to any of the ads, I was just window-shopping. While we had grown up poor, in many ways I had been sheltered, and I did not feel myself to be street-smart enough to handle myself well in such an encounter. But I did want, desperately, to find out if there were other gay men in my town and what they did and what they wanted and how they acted and the kinds of things they said to one another, and the easiest way for me to do that was by looking at the M4M postings on Craigslist. Our town was listed under the greater South Bay area, but there were a surprising number of salacious invitations within a fifteen-mile radius. The ads there were mostly terrifying to me, but I read them with absolute fascination, frantically decoding acronyms and learning lingo that seemed to me an indispensable code for gaining access to the world I would one day need to inhabit.

There was one other boy at my school who I could tell was also gay, but he was a quiet and obviously feminine sort, and I dreaded the episodes of Glee he would presumably insist we watch, as we drank, I imagined, Capri Suns purchased by his accepting mother.

During those late elementary, early middle school years, I was in crisis. I knew that I was gay, but I did not want to be gay-gay. I did not want other people to know, but I also had a culturally acquired prejudice against queen-y mannerisms for their own sake. That was a popular take when I was growing up, among the post–Will & Grace generation: Fine, do what you want in bed, but do you have to talk in an annoying voice? I did not want to be annoying, I did not want to be wrong, I wanted to be right. And yet I knew that something about the way my hands moved betrayed me, the way I walked, my vocabulary, my voice. I did not consciously choose my eyeliner and septum piercing and long hair as a disguise, but in retrospect that is exactly what they were. I knew I could not pass as straight, but I thought perhaps I could pass as “just weird.” No, I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself. I probably would have really loved Glee.

The first ad I ever responded to on Craigslist was from a “20yo Shy Boi” who said he had never been kissed, and wanted his first kiss to be on the pier at Redondo Beach. The ad was sweet and stammering, and before I could reconsider, I hurriedly wrote back that I also had never been kissed and would love to share his first kiss with him on the pier.

We set a date and time, and I took the bus down to Redondo Beach, a halting, galloping ride down Sepulveda that took nearly an hour and a half, though the actual mileage was scant, and I made my way out onto the pier, a massive U-shaped expanse, where seafood restaurants served slabs of grilled fish on sheets of newspaper and gelato shops spilled neon light, and I waited and waited, until finally a fat ginger-haired boy came up to me. I could see at once why no one had kissed him: His skin (pale), his lips (chapped), his hair (bowl), his shirt (Super Mario Bros.), all were nerd. Even the air around him seemed to nerd. I did not find him attractive, but I could in no way stomach the thought of turning him down now, so brutally, in such a carnival atmosphere, not to mention the wasted bus fare, and so we stood together for a long time by the sea, not saying much except that we were both nervous and that I was younger than he thought I’d be, and then he lunged at me.

The kiss was wet and squirmy and terrible, but it was over soon enough, and we did not repeat it, though we did sit on a bench side by side, I think both of us scanning our surroundings to reassure ourselves that skinheads were not going to rush out of the arcade and push us into the sea for being homos. When we finally parted after some truly painful conversation about the video game Halo 3, we hugged, though the term “hug” does nothing to evoke the awkward frozen grip we used, unable to relax, unable to let go, both of us shuddering every time we breathed in or out. When this intimacy became unbearable, it became so in unison, and in magical concord we released our grip, thanked each other, and departed, going opposite ways on the U-shaped pier. We never spoke to each other again.

It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.